Fernando Alonso says Formula 1 doesn’t focus on positives enough as he defended Aston Martin’s tire call in the Monaco Grand Prix.
Meeting F1 media ahead of his home race at the Spanish Grand Prix, Alonso found the main topic remained whether his Aston Martin team missed the chance to win in Monaco by fitting slick tires to Alonso’s car on a wet track, resulting in him needing to pit again one lap later. Alonso admits with hindsight it would have been better to switch to intermediates initially but that there’s not enough credit being given to the way the call was made at the time.
“Maybe if you have the crystal ball and you know the conditions, you know who stops and who doesn’t stop, and then finally it rains and you need the inters, then 100 percent you stop for inters,” Alonso said. “What I don’t like in Formula 1 is that we see always the negatives and we always see everything very easy from the sofa.
“I tell you an example: If we stopped for inters, this week we would only talk about the wrong decision of Red Bull stopping one lap too late. We would never have thought that Aston Martin was very brave and chose the right tire, we would only talk that Red Bull chose the wrong tire and stopped Max (Verstappen) one lap too late. This is just the mentality of the unlimited search for perfection, which is not possible to reach sometimes.
“So if you (are) put in our shoes and there was half of the track dry and half starting to get wet and we had a free stop and everyone behind was on dry tires, if we stop for dry tires and eventually we have to stop for wet tires, everyone stops for wet tires and we keep just the position. If we stop for inters and it doesn’t rain and everyone behind us is with drys and we need to stop for drys, then we fall to seventh. So if we take the wrong decision and finish P2 in Monaco, we took that.
“Now if we look at the race on TV again we will stop for inters, 100 percent yes, that was better. But in that moment, why didn’t Max stop for inters as well? He went one lap longer than me but with a different tire. Difficult to know, but as I said, the biggest thing is that at every race we never put enough prize to the right things that the teams, in very stressful moments, do. We always spot the one thing that they do wrong and then we go hard on them.”
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Ahead of this weekend’s grand prix in Barcelona, Alonso says he feels no closer to winning a race this season and that Aston Martin will need to improve the rate at which it brings upgrades to its car as it grows.
“We have some new parts. I’m not sure exactly what — you will see it on the documents that the FIA is releasing. I think front wing, there is some modification there and we are always bringing new parts to the car — some of them are circuit-specific and sometimes they are just an improvement in lap time.
“I am happy with how we are approaching every race. There is always something new on our car and we have to keep up the pace with the top teams. We are still growing in that area of the team, and we found ourselves in a competitive place this year that we didn’t expect.
“I think we still need to speed up things, because I still think Ferrari or Mercedes are already two floors into this season, and I think Mercedes had a completely new car in Monaco and more upgrades here. Red Bull had the Baku package and another one here. So we understand that we are not in that position yet, but we stay humble, delivering the job on Sundays and try to score more points than them.”
